A vision-based hand gesture recognition system, as reported in the proceeding of Computer Vision in Human-Computer Interaction, ECCV 2004 Workshop on HCl, May 16, 2004, entitled, “Hand Gesture Recognition in Camera-Projector System” authored by Licsár and Szirányi, provides a hand segmentation method for a camera-projector system to achieve an augmented reality tool. Hand localization is based on a background subtraction, which adapts to the changes of the projected background. Hand poses are described by a method based on modified Fourier descriptors, which involves distance metric for the nearest neighbor classification.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,128,003 A discloses a hand gesture recognition system and method that uses skin color to localize a hand in an image. Gesture recognition is performed based on template matching. Models of different hand gestures are built so that in real time, the unknown rotational vector can be compared to all models, the correct hand shape being the one with the smallest distance. To make model search more efficient, these models are arranged in a hierarchical structure according to their similarity to one another.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,599,561 B2 discloses a compact interactive tabletop with projection-vision system particularly for front-projected vision-based table systems for virtual reality purpose. The system utilizes an infrared LED illuminant to generate a finger shadow and use the shadow to detect whether finger touches the table surface or hover over the table surface.
“Fast tracking of hands and finger tips in infrared images for augmented desk interface” published in IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Mar. 2000, Sato, Kobayashi and Koike introduced augmented desk interface system in which a user can use natural hand gestures to simultaneously manipulate both physical objects and electronically projected objects on a desk. An infrared camera is used to detect light emitted from a surface by setting the temperature range to approximate human body temperature (30° C. to 34° C.), so that image regions corresponding to human skin appear particularly bright in the images from the infrared camera.